Film and Conference Modules
Pioneers of the Dutch Modern House
This program consists of five modules, each with a keynote lecture and an episode of a series of thematic videos in which twenty iconic houses across the Netherlands are featured: from the Amsterdam School and De Stijl to Postmodernism; from Gerrit Rietveld to Mart van Schijndel and many others. We also offer the five thematic videos as one film of an hour. The film also presents famous examples of social housing, an area in which The Netherlands was particularly rich in the 20th-century.
Module 5
Home as Self-Portrait: Architect's Houses
Video on demand.
Lecture: English. Video: Dutch spoken and English subtitles.
Keynote address by Gennaro Postiglione and video presented by Natascha Drabbe.
Home as Self-Portrait: Architect's Houses
Gennaro Postiglione is Professor in Interior Architecture at Politecnico di Milano and author of The Architect's Home (Taschen), – a topic he revisits as a keynote speaker at the online conference Pioneers of the Modern Dutch Modern House. His research field is domestic interiors culture, at the intersection between people, places, and practices, crossing architecture, ethnography, and material culture. The same theoretical background nourishes also his research by design activity addressed towards adaptive reuse of minor and/or neglected heritage. Recently, he has engaged in a research investigating dwelling practices with the goal to provide new housing solutions for contemporary extremely articulated and differentiated households. He understands research and teaching – and tries to be consistent with - as an integral part of design practice.
In his keynote address, Gennaro looks at the architect’s house as an interesting form of 3D self-reflection which is otherwise rare in the architect’s oeuvre. In all houses built by architects for themselves, you see a mix of character and ideas – which may or may not be in harmony with each other.
Natascha Drabbe is the founder and executive director of the Iconic Houses network. She graduated in architectural history from Utrecht University and has published, curated, lectured and been a member of design and architecture juries at home and abroad. She was an international project manager at the Dutch Design Foundation (Premsela) from 2002 to 2006. In 2007, she set up the Mart van Schijndel Foundation, in order to keep that architect’s ideas alive and make his home in Utrecht available for guided tours, lectures and film screenings. This was followed by launch of the Iconic Houses Foundation in 2008 and the website iconichouses.org in 2012. International Iconic Houses conferences have been held in London, Barcelona, Los Angeles and New Canaan.
Houses that architects design for themselves are like test labs for new ideas. In the four houses that are central to this episode, we see the architects Van Ravesteyn, Jan de Jong, Mart van Schijndel and the Kortekaas artists duo putting their theories into practice down to the smallest detail. We also see what a challenge it is to build an experimental house with the small budget that architects usually have for their own homes. As a result, they often experiment with unorthodox, cheap building materials, which later leads to major restoration issues. Natascha lives in the Van Schijndel House in Utrecht.
Houses that are featured in this episode are:
Sybold van Ravesteyn House, Sybold van Ravesteyn, 1932
Jan de Jonghuis, Jan de Jong, 1956-1983
Van Schijndel House, Mart van Schijndel, 1992
The Tempelhof, Huub & Adelheid Kortekaas, 1995-1999